are lifelong interests of mine thanks to my mother. One of my earliest memories is as a young child going with her, and my older sister, to the library.

Ever since then I have regularly visited the local library, wherever I have lived, and always been a borrower. Not surprisingly I have always also loved browsing in book shops.

Being a bookoholic I usually have several books on the go at any one time. One is inevitably a crime novel, anything from a traditional Agatha Christie to the latest Graham Hurley police procedural. Another is a classic such as Moby-Dick or Catch-22. There's something on recent history like 1914 - 1918 The History of the First World War by David Stevenson, and in conjunction with that Never Such Innocence - Poems of the First World War edited by Martin Stephen.

The list of books to read never seems to get smaller, just the opposite in fact. I wouldn't have it any other way!

This poem by John Gillespie Magee is probably the most well known of all aviation poems.

He wrote it on 3 September,1941 and sent a copy to his parents, who in turn sent it to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

This American flying Spitfires with the Royal Canadian Air Force in England died aged just 19 following a mid-air collision on 11 December,1941.

The original poem was put on display in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, where it remains to this day.

Copies of a war poster with a montage of the poem, the writer and a Spitfire were distributed to every airfield in Britain and the Commonwealth.

In 1971 James Irwin, pilot of the Apollo 15 lunar module carried a copy of High Flight to the moon. Preident Reagan quoted lines from it at the dedication service for the astronauts lost in the Space shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986.

High Flight by John Gillespie Magee
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.